China Builds Military; Neighbors, U.S. Uneasy : Asia: Beijing says its intentions are peaceful, but other nations fear emergence of a new regional superpower.

WASHINGTON — China is building up its military capability, methodically seeking the naval and air power it needs to assert dominance in Southeast Asia and to ensure that Taiwan, which Beijing views as a breakaway province, never assumes the status of a fully independent country.

The most significant evidence of China’s drive to acquire high-tech weaponry was its recent purchase of two dozen Sukhoi 27 fighter planes, which are expected to operate out of Hainan Island and China’s eastern coast. The Bush Administration cited China’s acquisition of Russian warplanes as the principal justification for Washington’s decision this month to clear the way for sale of American F-16 jet fighters to Taiwan.

Beijing has also shown long-term interest in equipping its navy with aircraft carriers, which are fundamentally offensive weapons.

And these high-profile efforts are merely the start. Military analysts say the People’s Liberation Army is seeking to make a host of other improvements in its air force and navy, including air-refueling equipment, better missile technology, a new generation of frigates and destroyers, and the development of a substantial force of submarines.

While China insists that its intentions are purely peaceful, its actions are unsettling to officials in the United States and to China’s Asian neighbors, who fear the emergence of a new military superpower in a region where the Soviet threat has all but vanished and where America’s military presence is being scaled back.

“They’re going in for modernization and power projection. . . . This is a unifying move, a nationalistic move,” explained one senior U.S. official concerned by China’s military and territorial ambitions. “There are strong lobbying interests in China, a bad energy situation, a myriad of factors driving this process.”

China’s buildup is worrisome to its neighbors, particularly because of Beijing’s vast territorial claims throughout the East Asian region. Every national map published in China offers a world of insight into Beijing’s long-term military and strategic goals.

Starting from Hainan Island, the southernmost point that outsiders usually think of as Chinese territory, a dotted line sweeps southward 1,000 miles, past Vietnam to the coast of Borneo. China’s claimed border then edges along the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah before turning north to skirt the Philippines and take in Taiwan.

The line encompasses most of the South China Sea, including many small islands in the possession of Southeast Asian countries. The audacity of the map-drawers may seem breathtaking. But Beijing is serious.

“Virtually every nation in East Asia can agree that the People’s Republic of China’s growing naval and air-strike capacities will become a significant concern in the minds of strategic planners,” wrote Taeho Kim, a South Korean defense analyst, in a recent study of China’s military buildup.

To an extent, these analysts say, Chinese leaders are merely trying to make up for past deficiencies. For decades, China had the world’s largest army but operated with antiquated equipment. The Chinese army’s technology level has lagged 10 to 20 years behind that of developed Western nations.

In the 1980s, the Chinese leadership was interested in military modernization but gave relatively low priority to military spending and held down army budgets. But after the 1989 crackdown on China’s pro-democracy movement, the regime was forced to turn its attention to ensuring the political reliability of the military.

China’s current modernization drive appears to have been prompted, at least in part, by the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which demonstrated to Chinese leaders the critical role that high technology plays in modern warfare.

“The realities of regional wars--especially the recent one--tell us that modern warfare is high-tech warfare,” Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin, who is also chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, said in a speech shortly after the Gulf fighting ended. “It is warfare involving land, sea and air forces. It is electronic war, guided-missile war. To fall behind means to get thrashed.”

The People’s Liberation Army, which includes land, sea and air forces, is about 3 million strong. China also has a 600,000-member paramilitary force, the People’s Armed Police, dedicated to internal control. The army operates with an official 1992 defense budget of $6.8 billion. But Western analysts say real defense spending is double this amount and has increased sharply since 1989. Planned manpower cuts of at least 200,000 over the next few years are expected to free up more money for modernization.

Even without its new weapons purchases, China--which long feared a Soviet invasion--already has enough military power to enable it to resist attack. Its strategic weapons include eight intercontinental ballistic missiles, 60 intermediate-range missiles, a submarine equipped with 12 nuclear-capable missiles and 120 medium-range H-6 bombers, some capable of delivering nuclear weapons; the Chinese military reportedly has deployed tactical nuclear weapons.

China’s army has more than 12,000 tanks. There have been recent reports that it plans to upgrade its arsenal by buying 400 T-72 main battle tanks from Russia. The Chinese navy has about 100 submarines; its air force has 880 combat aircraft and 65 armed helicopters. And in each category, China either has bought or is shopping for improvements.

“They (Chinese leaders) have already bought the Sukhoi 27s, and we don’t know where (the military purchases) are going to stop,” said one Administration policy-maker. “There’s a lot of concern around the region. We think this (sale of American planes to Taiwan) has the effect of regional stabilization.”

Japanese officials, too, have recently admitted to new worries about China’s buildup. “We had thought that China’s military power would not become the kind of threat that the former Soviet Union was,” a senior Japanese defense official, Haruo Ueno, said last month. “But now, China is modernizing its armed forces, especially its naval power.”

U.S. military experts say the new warplanes that China purchased from Russia give the Chinese air force an offensive capability it never had before. “With the Sukhoi 27s, they don’t even have to leave Chinese territory to fire their ordnance” against Taiwan, said one U.S. Air Force analyst.

The Nationalist government in Taiwan fled there in 1949 after losing to Communist forces in a civil war on the mainland. Both Beijing and Taipei since have claimed to be the legitimate government of all China. In recent years, relations between the two have improved. But Beijing still threatens to take military action if Taiwan declares itself an independent country.

The Sukhoi 27 warplane purchase is merely part of an extensive effort by China to buy advanced military hardware from Russian defense industries and to obtain technology from Russian scientists. “They (Chinese officials) are looking at MIG-31s and a whole set of new weapons and technology of mass destruction,” one senior U.S. official said.

China also has expressed interest in buying an aircraft carrier now under construction at a Ukrainian shipyard. It is unclear whether China will decide to spend the huge sum needed to acquire the carrier or, even if it does, whether Ukraine will agree to sell it.

Some defense analysts say that China’s weapons acquisitions reflect, more than anything else, a response to the opportunities presented by the breakup of the Soviet Union and the turmoil in its economy and defense industries. “This is a great moment for China to acquire modern weapons and technology at a cheap price,” said Andrew N. D. Yang of the Sun Yat-sen Center for Policy Studies in Taiwan.

Further, the collapse of Soviet power has sharply reduced the strategic threat to China from the north, freeing it to devote more attention to its southern frontiers.

Defense analysts say the South China Sea is a potential flash point that could embroil China in a possible military conflict. China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei all claim sovereignty over some or all of the South China Sea islands known as the Spratlys and the Paracels, which are believed to sit above potentially valuable oil and gas deposits.

While insisting that China has sovereignty over the region, Beijing has sought to reassure Southeast Asia by promising that territorial disputes may be shelved to allow for joint exploration of resources.

And Chinese officials now suggest that Japan and the United States are exaggerating the extent of China’s military buildup. One Chinese source suggested recently that the fears of China’s military modernization have been fanned by Tokyo as a way of deflecting attention of Asian governments from the growing power of Japan.

Holley reported from Beijing, and Mann reported from Washington.